La Belle Dame Sans Merci
by Gaby Black
Summary: A Bellatrix Black character sketch.


**Disclaimer:** I own nothing. The extract at the beginning is taken from John Keats's poem. I do not own it.

**Author's note:** first time writing Bella. Please tell me what you think!

* * *

_I met a lady in the meads,_

_Full beautiful, a faery's child:_

_Her hair was long, her foot was ligh,_

_And her eyes were wild._

_(__La Belle Dame Sans Merci__, by John Keats)_

* * *

Her beauty had deceived him. Her beauty deceived most people, really. She only had to flutter her eyelashes at him and smile languidly for him to ask her father for her hand. Since she was ten, her marriage had been arranged with Rabastan, older than his brother by two years, but she had made her own choice. Rabastan was too soft to make a good husband for her. Rodolphus was a bit more of a challenge.

Yet how easy it had been to make him fall for her! Maybe not fall _in love_, but much enough to make him want to marry her. The facility almost prevented her from enjoying it because Bellatrix Black liked to fight her way through life; anything which was too easy was uninteresting.

A dance, a few words and a mysterious smile were all it took her to get him. A few days of negotiations between their parents later, he was hers.

She was seven years older than him, and as she looked at him she saw a very young man – barely eighteen; he had just graduated from Hogwarts. So young; so easy to fool. And she knew perfectly well what great power beauty held on young men like him.

Her eyes especially were a real weapon. Dark and heavy-lidded, they could hide the cruelty and put forward the magic. They were like the galaxy: black and infinite and fathomless. They were eyes one could get lost in and never come back.

Contrary to the saying, they were not the window to Bella's soul - they were just part of the masquerade.

She was the older woman, more experienced, the _femme fatale_, and she lived up to her reputation. She had broken many hearts. She liked playing that role. It made her forget that she was twenty-five and still unmarried because Lucius Malfoy had chosen Narcissa over her (really, who could blame him? Narcissa was so much easier to model to his taste) and there were no other appropriate, respectable pureblood men to marry. So Bella had waited, secretly enjoying her freedom, and promising to herself that she would never let her husband, whoever it was, choose for her.

She always had her own way. That was the way it went with Bellatrix Black (she always preferred her name to Lestrange's – in her head she was still Bellatrix Black). He knew it. _Everyone_ knew it. But her practiced smile, his hand through her thick, long black hair, a wink from her fascinating dark eyes and he forgot his own name.

His illusions perdured even when he saw her become a murderer - and she dragged him along with her.

She killed for the first time when she was twenty-six. She was never the same after that. Or rather, she had become herself.

Bella loved having power over people, whether by killing or by manipulating them. This rush of power was the thing that made her life worth living. After all, her name didn't mean female warrior for nothing. What a terrible thing it was, and yet what a _thrill_, to be able to decide who had the right to live and who had not. She felt like a deity with boundless ambitions.

She longed for the day England would be governed by purebloods. That was one reason for killing this worthless scum (the other one was that she liked it). Muggles, bloodtraitors or Mudbloods, what did it matter? They all stood in her way. They were all the same to her – eyes widened with fear (she never noticed their colours), pleading faces staring up at her (she never remembered their features), crying, begging her for mercy –

Bellatrix Black knew not mercy.

Sometimes she laughed when she killed (like when she had killed Sirius, the arrogant prat who was in no way a Black, and _oh_, the priceless, crestfallen look on the boy's face made everything worth it!).

Sometimes she just watched them die.

She never cried.

* * *

**Please review! Reviews are the only payment fanfic authors receive. Even if it's just a word or two, leaving a review lets me know you've passed this way. Thank you!**


End file.
